Would you mind expanding on why it's mass surveillance and of no benefit to children? Like they're pretending it's to protect kids and getting what from us exactly?

[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

There are very good explanations out there but the short of it is: every major internet service is now going to be connected to either your official piece of government ID, or a high resolution, well lit image of your face. Kids work around it but its a mass surveillance wet dream.

[–] HumanOnEarth@lemmy.ca 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I don't get it.

99% of people who are online, the government already knows who you are and what you look like? What part of providing an ID gives "them" any more information than they already have?

[–] yuri@pawb.social 2 points 11 hours ago

for the government to tie any traffic directly to an individual would require data from your service provider, which they generally don’t provide without some kind of legal reason.

fwiu this system would essentially make everything you view and do on the internet freely snoopable without any sort of legal order or reason. your traffic is always tied to your name or face, and you lose the layer of pseudo-anonymity from your ISP.

potential real-world consequence, you could be more easily sued by a production or broadcast company for piracy! right now if i torrent the right movie (without a proxy), i’ll get a letter from my ISP explaining that 20th century fox is asking them for my name and address so they can sue me. but the ISP won’t give the info without a legal order, and fox can’t sue anyone without the info.

so if this change happened, you’d have to hope your government decides to treat you more favorably than myriad other billion dollar companies and corporations. historically these are bad odds.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 1 day ago

What the politicians get: A smug feeling of satisfaction, having done something they were told was good.

What the children get: Anxiety, incentive to cheat the system and to keep their Internet use secret from parents, a new reason to feel that the world is unfair to them.

What the budding "age verification" industry gets: Amazing new business opportunities.

What Facebook gets: A regulatory barrier to entry high enough to keep out any competition from some hypothetical new form of social media that would respect its users, since that is now illegal.

What spies and hackers get: Amazing new opportunities to steal everyone's personal data.

What those of us too stubborn to ever submit to "age verification" get: We'll be unable to use regulated social media and will have to make do with the Fediverse, possibly moving to instances hosted in whatever distant corner of the world still allows free use of communications media.

[–] kevinrns@mstdn.social 3 points 1 day ago

@HumanOnEarth

Michael Geist makes several points, Cory Doctorow, the EFF have been explaining why.